Native American Slavery and the Early Modern World

An array of important scholarship over the past fifteen years has sought to recover the untold history of the enslavement and forced relocation throughout the western hemisphere of millions of indigenous slaves labeled as “indios” or “Indians” from 1492 to 1850. The majority of works concentrate on those territories comprising what is now the United States, although new studies on the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese imperial arenas reveal the ubiquity of this unlawful bondage and the integrality of it to early modern European and native American forms of governance. I seek to unite these disparate “imperial” historiographies and explain why early modern and contemporary historical narratives have disregarded both the enormity and ongoing nature of this important phenomenon. Specifically, I address why native American slavery has been wrongfully characterized as a minor phenomenon that presaged the large-scale diaspora of millions of African slaves to the western hemisphere.